Trix A Rich Text Editor for Everyday Writing. Compose beautifully formatted text in your web application. Trix is a WYSIWYG editor for writing messages, comments, articles, and lists—the simple documents most web apps are made of. Markdown comments will be imported as is: Apollo won’t render them as Markdown text. The bright side is that Markdown still looks OK, even if not rendered. For rich-HTML notes, they are imported as is and will render the same as they did in Basecamp once imported.

Recently, I write in Basecamp. It helps me to focus on the single piece of document.

Basecamp is project management tool that encourages context based communication for teams. I have been using Basecamp solo and enjoying the tools it provides. Recently, I’m using Basecamp to write.

There are 2 states when writing a document in Basecamp. They are either drafts or published. Drafts are private to owner. In my solo Basecamp project, published document is only visible to me as well. I used the “Draft” state for any writing-in-progress document. I can quickly access to my these unfinished drafts through the “My Drafts” link. When the writings is ready for editing, I “post” it as published state and store it in the “Docs & Files” area.

If I need to seek external review for my copywriting, I can share the document via a public link with random hash.

Unlike writing app that often provides immediate edit and auto-save-and-sync functionality. The editing process is quite manual in Basecamp. I need to click “edit” every time when I want to make change. And “save” when I’m done writing. The extra steps to edit and save the document is quite similar to the code check-out and check-in approach. It helps me to stay focus in this distraction world. It is like having a un-staged changes in `git status`. I need to type as much as possible in the document and then click “save” to check-in the writing changes.

Of course, the editor in Basecamp does auto-save the content in local storage until it is being saved to server. So my content won’t be lost. But the “un-staged” state forces me to finish something before I save it again, so that I don’t feel guilty of not writing anything before save, or not saving before I get distracted.

Basecamp Markdown App

Basecamp Markdown Download

After finishing the writing, I can then copy the text to the final destination process. If it is an email, I copy the rich text to the mail client. If it is a blog, I copy the rich text to the WordPress editor and re-upload the images. If it is a markdown output, I copy the HTML code and convert them into markdown. Or I just copy the simple rich text into to markdown file if they are plain text article.

Basecamp 3 Markdown

The exporting process may not be ideal, but it doesn’t take too much time when comparing to the time wasted in writing nothing in distracted environment.